"Raising Question"

Brendan Nyhan has a smart take on yesterday's bogus Times story about some of Barack Obama's investments that "raise questions" about this and that. In fact, once you read through the whole article then go back and read it again to try to make sense of it, you'll see that no questions are, in fact, raised. Instead, Barack Obama made some financial transactions that the Times has no evidence were improper and for which there does not appear to be any realistic motive for improper action (nobody, for example, profited financially from the transaction) and for which there are perfectly plausible explanations.

The Times reporter, in short, saw something that did arguably raise questions. He looked into it. He found nothing. Then rather than printing nothing -- since, after all, that's what he found -- he instead went to press with a story that "raises questions" -- a formulation that simply amounts to a presumption of guilt. It raises the question of when America's newspapers just threw in the towel and decided they had no real obligations to inform their readers rather than mislead them.